Agit-Opera

“Mahogonny” and “The Grapes of Wrath”

The stars of the L.A. Opera production of “Mahagonny”: Anthony Dean Griffey,Audra McDonald, and Patti LuPone. Photograph by Yelena Yemchuk.

Bertolt Brecht, the great politicizer of art, thought that opera was too laden with tradition to deliver shocks to the social order. As far as he was concerned, “Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny,” his 1930 collaboration with Kurt Weill, fell into the category of “culinary opera”—a medium of transient pleasure, even if it managed to leave a delectably bitter taste in the mouths of the middle classes. Weill, though, believed that opera could comprehensively synthesize art, entertainment, and critique, and “Mahagonny,” which progresses implacably from the vinegar pop of the “Alabama Song” to the Mahlerian hammer blows of the final scene, crystallized his vision. Indeed, Brecht spoke slightingly of the project in large part because Weill made it his own; it’s less a piece of up-to-date agitprop than a timeless morality tale, describing an Everyman’s downfall in an unusually diverting hell on earth. For a long time, it was fashionable to dismiss Weill as the lesser of the two collaborators, because he gave up leftist composition in favor of a comfortable Broadway career; yet his conception of musical theatre as an art-pop hybrid has proved to be one of the twentieth century’s enduring legacies, reverently cited every time an ambitious young composer tries to shake up the routines of risk-averse Broadway theatres or opera houses.

“Mahagonny” is having a cultural moment. A production by John Doyle, who recently directed “Sweeney Todd” and “Company” on Broadway, is playing at the Los Angeles Opera through March 4th, while another staging appeared last week at Opera Boston; a third is scheduled for the Spoleto Festival, in Charleston, South Carolina, in May and June. It’s not hard to guess why a tale of a pleasure-seeking American city threatened by a hurricane seems au courant, or why Brecht’s assault on winner-take-all capitalism doesn’t feel dated in the least. The relevance of the material has not, however, made it any easier to stage. “Mahagonny” is a delicate balancing act between Brecht’s pitilessness and Weill’s humanism, not to mention a tricky synthesis of classical and popular traditions.

Doyle errs on the side of the culinary, skimming over the darker, knottier aspects of the piece. His Mahagonny is made to resemble Las Vegas—a logical choice, given Brecht’s canny prophecy of a vice-ridden paradise city rising in the American desert. Mark Bailey’s sets are sleek and spare, with iconic elements arranged in wide-open space—a highway sign, a dangling traffic light glowing red, neon ads for cocktails and dancing girls. The action onstage flows smoothly: Jimmy McIntyre, a lumberjack from Alaska, is shown riding high in Mahagonny’s nightspots, then is dragged down in a televised show trial when he commits the ultimate crime of running out of money. But the show lacks bite; its gestures are too slick and familiar. When Doyle tries to indicate a wider political context, he makes several major miscalculations, the most serious of which occurs at the end of the first act: the cast raises its arms in Fascist salutes while fragments of a Hitler speech resound on loudspeakers throughout the auditorium. Given Brecht’s own weakness for totalitarian ideology, it’s unwise to depict “Mahagonny” as a cautionary tale about the attractions of Fascism.

Also problematic is the production’s waffling between Broadway and operatic singing styles. On one side of the divide is Patti LuPone, as the gangsterish bigwig Leocadia Begbick, holding the audience mesmerized with her wise-ass attitude but struggling to encompass Weill’s high-lying vocal lines. On the other side is the superb young American tenor Anthony Dean Griffey, who hits all the notes but cossets them in diction that sounds rather too plummy for a lumberjack—“ahnd” for “and,” “yoooo” for “you.” The one performer who covers all the bases is Audra McDonald, singing the role of the prostitute Jenny with impeccable musicianship while exuding eyebrow-raising sexiness and sass. Burning in her eyes, from her first entrance, is a cold ambition to get ahead, which turns deliciously poisonous in Act III: she makes the “Benares Song”—“There is not much fun on this star”—a thing of drugged beauty, the pursuit of pleasure transformed into empty compulsion.

At the second performance in the run, James Conlon conducted in properly incisive, unsentimental fashion, refusing to linger over the favorite tunes. Right at the start, he underlined the fateful military beat that accompanies the founding of Mahagonny—Weill’s allusion, I think, to the morbid finale of Mahler’s Sixth Symphony—and by the end that same drumbeat sounded with scarily frigid force, chained to a machine-like, unyielding tempo. What was missing in the final scene was a strong stage picture to match the sound. When Jimmy is executed, Jenny is presented with a folded-up flag, which is evidently meant to remind us of Iraq; as with the Hitler salute, it feels gratuitous. Brecht’s instruction in the libretto cannot be bettered: a ragged procession of protesters, carrying contradictory placards, staggering toward the audience, a mirror image of our own political confusion.

By Brecht-Weill standards, American opera composers have been playing it safe these days, glomming on to one classic book or play after another, preferably one that Hollywood turned into an equally classic movie in the forties or fifties. “A Streetcar Named Desire,” “Little Women,” “The Great Gatsby,” “An American Tragedy,” and “Miss Lonelyhearts” all fit the description. At first glance, Ricky Ian Gordon’s “The Grapes of Wrath,” which recently had its première at the Minnesota Opera, would seem to be one more entry in the book-club genre. But it has teeth. John Steinbeck’s 1939 novel is, for all its hoary gestures, a passionately political work, showing in excruciating detail the fate of an Oklahoma family during the Great Depression, and Gordon, working in tandem with his librettist, Michael Korie, has found ways to leave its rage intact, even as he gives lyric voice to the suffering Joad clan.

“The Grapes of Wrath” won’t please Brechtians who demand total alienation from theatrical conventions. Gordon, who first made his name in the theatre and as a composer of Broadway-style songs, fills his score with beautifully turned genre pieces, often harking back to American popular music of the twenties and thirties: Gershwinesque song-and-dance numbers, a few sweetly soaring love songs in the manner of Jerome Kern, banjo-twanging ballads, saxed-up jazz choruses, even a barbershop quartet. You couldn’t ask for a more comfortably appointed evening of vintage musical Americana. Yet, with a slyness worthy of Weill, Gordon wields his hummable tunes to critical effect, as in a song-and-dance number devoted to the mass-production methods of Endicott Canneries, where the itinerant Joads seek employment. “Savor the flavor / choosy mothers favor / Always ask your grocer / For Endicott Brand,” a women’s chorus sings, in harmonies that clash slightly as they bounce along. It’s a commercial jingle that can’t conceal its cynical grimace.

The opera is framed and punctuated by a string of powerful choral numbers, which take the place of those two- or three-page prose poems in which Steinbeck depicted the deprivations of the Dust Bowl and California’s Central Valley. Here Gordon makes clear his growing ambitions as a theatre composer, a seriousness of purpose that had already surfaced in his haunting 2005 theatre piece “Orpheus and Euridice” (staged at Lincoln Center last season). The orchestra periodically echoes Copland in his “open prairie” mode—Bruce Coughlin helped prepare the finespun orchestrations—and the choral writing achieves an ardent simplicity that is very much Gordon’s own. One question hanging over this formidable work is whether each of the three acts is paced to best effect; a few trims or reorderings of numbers might benefit the whole. Then again, the opera achieves its impact because it does not skimp on detail and preserves the hugeness of Steinbeck’s canvas.

The Minnesota Opera may lack the high-powered resources of the L.A. Opera, which is presently being run by Plácido Domingo, but Eric Simonson and Allen Moyer, the director and the set designer, respectively, of “The Grapes of Wrath,” put together a handsome, flexible production. Each geographical setting—the Dust Bowl, Route 66, Endicott Canneries, a Hooverville—was established in quick, crisp strokes. Deanne Meek anchored the production with her strong, clear-voiced, unmannered portrayal of Ma Joad; Brian Leerhuber was stonily eloquent as her son Tom, and Kelly Kaduce warmly expressive as Rosasharn. Among singers in the smaller roles, the young baritone Kelly Markgraf stood out for his ringing voice and telling diction. (In a sign of the times, you can already watch a clip of him singing the “Aria of the Ragged Man” on YouTube.)

Political opera—by which one almost invariably means politics of the near- to far-left varieties, right-wing classical composers being an elusive species—faces an obvious paradox. Opera houses draw a diverse public, but for financial support they lean heavily on mega-wealthy corporations and executives, whose labor practices and moral self-justifications would elicit new blasts of invective from the likes of Brecht and Steinbeck. Brecht wanted to use opera as a kind of Trojan horse, to enter the palaces of the upper classes and prick their conscience. Gordon, Korie, and the Minnesota Opera administration seem to have had a similar purpose in mind, smuggling a fairly savage attack on corporate indifference into yet another musicalization of a familiar book. Chances are that no minds or hearts will be changed, but you have to admire the brass of a composer who makes the line “It’s not my fault” a four-note echo of Beethoven’s Fifth. ♦

Alex Ross has been contributing to The New Yorker since 1993, and he became the magazine’s music critic in 1996.